William Winfield Riefler

Background

Winfield W. Riefler was born on Feburary 9, 1897 in Buffalo, New York, the son of Clara Gartner and David Philip Riefler, an American Express Company manager.

Education

He attended public schools in Rochester, New York, and entered Amherst College in 1915. Then he studied economics in Amherst under Walter Stewart, and graduated with a B. A. in 1921.

During the 1920's, Riefler attended the Robert Brookings Graduate School in Washington, D. C. , and was awarded a Ph. D. in 1927. His dissertation on money markets was published by Harper Brothers as Money Rates and Money Markets in the United States (1930). His research also led the Federal Reserve Board to issue a weekly table of statistics entitled "Member Bank Reserves, Reserve Bank Credit and Related Items, " which was published in the monthly Federal Reserve Bulletin.

Career

In 1917, he joined an American volunteer ambulance unit serving with French forces in World War I and was awarded the croix de guerre in 1919. Riefler briefly served as a foreign trade officer assisting the American commercial attaché in Buenos Aires, then started his own import-export business in New York City.

The venture was unsuccessful, and in 1923 he joined the staff of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D. C. He worked under Stewart, who had been appointed director of the board's Division of Analysis and Research, as a research economist concentrating on the domestic money market and credit issues.

Riefler served as secretary of the Federal Reserve System's Committee on Bank Reserves in the period 1930-1931. When the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, Riefler served as one of its economic advisers. He helped to organize the Federal Housing Administration and drafted the margin provision of the Securities and Exchange Commission Act (1934). He later organized the Central Statistical Board and served as adviser to Roosevelt's Executive Council and later to the National Emergency Council. He also assisted in preparing the Tripartite Agreement (1936) between the United States, Britain, and France, the first major move toward international monetary stabilization after the stock market crash of 1929.

In 1935, Riefler left Washington to join the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, as a professor in the School of Economics and Politics. The institute's director, Abraham Flexner, had offered the post to Stewart, who suggested Riefler for the position. During this period Riefler served as president of the American Statistical Association. He helped to organize, and served as director of, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and chaired the NBER Exploratory Committee on Financial Research.

His committee's recommendations prompted the NBER to organize its Program of Financial Research in 1937. Funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Association of Reserve City Bankers supported statistical studies on consumer debt and installment credit, corporate financing, and urban-mortgage financing. During this period Riefler continued to serve as an unofficial adviser to the Roosevelt administration on monetary policy and international finance.

He was an alternate member of the League of Nations Finance Committee (1937 - 1946) and a director of the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia (1941 - 1942). After American entry into World War II, Riefler advised Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau on reorganizing the Treasury Department and creating the Board of Economic Warfare.

In 1942, Riefler was sent to London as special assistant to Ambassador John Gilbert Winant, with responsibility for economic warfare and oversight of overseas Lend-Lease operations.

After the war, Riefler returned to the Institute for Advanced Study but continued to advise the Truman administration on economic issues. He was a consultant to the 1947 Select Committee on Foreign Aid headed by Christian Herter, and American member of the UN Subcommission on Employment and Economic Stability. He also served as a director of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 1948, Riefler took a leave of absence from the Institute for Advanced Study to become the assistant to Thomas McCabe, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In 1951, President Truman replaced McCabe with investment banker William McChesney Martin, Jr. , a deputy secretary of the Treasury who had helped supervise Lend-Lease operations during World War II. Martin retained Riefler in his post of assistant to the chairman, and appointed him secretary of the Federal Open Market Committee in 1952.

When the Eisenhower administration took office in 1953, it kept Martin and Riefler in their posts at the Federal Reserve Board. Throughout the 1950's, they concentrated on adjusting monetary policy to fight the inflationary impact of the large U. S. military budgets resulting from the Cold War.

In 1959, the British Parliament invited Riefler to give testimony (the only American witness) before the Radcliffe Committee on Debt Management and Monetary Policy. Riefler resigned from the staff of the Federal Reserve Board in December 1959 and retired to Florida.

He died in Sarasota, Florida.

Achievements

• Riefler is credited with inventing the modern amortized home mortgage. This new mortgage type was designed to be more stable than the balloon mortgages common during the 1920s, which had led to the National Mortgage Crisis of the 1930s.

Connections

Dorothy Miles Brown and Riefler were married on December 5, 1924; they had two sons.

Father:

David Philip Riefler

Mother:

Clara Gartner

Spouse:

Dorothy Miles Brown